The field of the invention relates generally to the offering of financial products to customers, and more specifically to methods and systems for life stage modeling.
A life stage segment is a group of consumers who are classified based on shared demographics and/or certain differentiating spending behaviors. Banks often have dozens, if not hundreds, of payment cards and financial transaction cards and other financial products designed to meet the needs of their consumers at various stages in their life. A couple of examples include student transaction cards and loans, banking products designed for young families, and retirement products for older customers. Generally, each of these consumer groups are at different life stages and therefore have differentiating spending behaviors.
However, a lack of detailed consumer information coupled with an inability of these banks to share consumer data across departments makes it difficult to match various life stage based financial products with the correct consumers. At least one result is that the banks waste resources on poorly targeted promotional campaigns. Further, consumers get inundated with irrelevant offers that do not match their needs or preferences, often to the point that they will ignore offers that are relevant to their financial needs.
Banks would like to focus their services and desire to market those services more effectively than currently utilized marketing methods. In addition, it is desired that the services, and the marketing of such services, be accomplished without continuously gathering, storing and updating consumer data. With such a system, the customers receive information and offers for products that are more relevant and useful to them. In such a system, banks identify a consumer's propensity to be in a given life stage using only the information from consumer transactions on their payment card, for example, credit cards and debit cards.